Now, with that said, I want to remind you that if you look at the side effects of ANY drug, you'll find scary shit on all of them. I'm sure I'll put patients on Fycompa, and most will likely do fine.

But still, I really like this line from the FDA forms:

"The Sponsor has reported that no homicides were committed by a subject while taking perampanel."

Wouldn't you just LOVE to be able to stand up in front of a government panel and say that with a straight face? "Yeah, I mean, there were a few people who became violent on our drug, but it's not like they killed anyone or something."
So with that backdrop, it falls to the marketing wizards to make this drug look good. Their job is to promote strengths and minimize weaknesses. So what image should they use to distract people from the side effect of violent behavior. Hmmm... Flowers? Butterflies? Or maybe...

A boxing glove! Yes, they really picked a boxing glove. I swear, I am not making this up.

And, since the glove is green, perhaps they should consider this spokesman:

"HULK TAKE FYCOMPA! MAKE HULK MAD!"*

*Hulk is copyrighted by Marvel Comics, along with the Avengers, Spider Man, Dr. Strange, the Fantastic Four, and a bunch of others I don't want to mess with. Or prescribe Fycompa to.**

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

A lot of press has recently been given to the untimely death of Aaron Swartz. Regardless of his legal issues (and I'm not getting into them) he was obviously a brilliant mind, gone too soon.

But I want to tell you about one you may have never heard of.

John Kennedy Toole (born 1937), from an early age, was an unquestionably brilliant individual. He received excellent marks in high school, graduated with honors from Tulane university (to which he'd received a full scholarship at age 17) and got a masters degree from Columbia. He went on to become a professor at Hunter College in New York, becoming (at age 22) the youngest professor in the institution's history.

In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed in Puerto Rico, teaching English to local recruits. There he began writing a remarkable novel. He left the military in 1963, and completed the book in 1964.

Over the next several years he submitted it to 3 publishers, all of whom rejected it. The disappointments led to him becoming despondent, than an alcoholic, and then paranoid. He was convinced he was being followed and frequently searched his home for electronic mind-reading devices. At one point he began having severe headaches, but refused to see a neurologist (speaking as a neurologist, the personality changes and headaches raise a number of diagnostic possibilities, but I'm not going to address that further).

In 1969 he went on a long drive across the country, finally ending in Biloxi, Mississippi. There, in March, he committed suicide by running a garden hose from his car's exhaust through the window. He left a suicide note which his mother read, then destroyed. He was 31 years old.

His rejected manuscript sat, untouched, on an armoire in his old room at his parent's house. In 1971 his mother tried again to have it published - only to collect 7 more rejections over the next 5 years (modern readers may remember that 2 major studios - United Artists and Universal - both rejected the script for Star Wars during this same time frame as having no potential for success).

In 1976 author Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola University New Orleans. Toole's mother wrote and called him, to the extent that he complained to his wife about her. He tried to dodge her, but at one point she actually pushed her way into his office with the single precious copy of the manuscript. He finally agreed to look at it, figuring it would be so awful that after a few pages he'd be done with it.

He was wrong.

As he wrote later, "I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it
was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a
growing excitement, and finally an incredulity; surely it was not
possible that it was so good."

Walker Percy was, in the end, stunned by the book, and put his own efforts into getting it published. It finally went to press in 1980. In 1981 it won a Pulitzer Prize, 12 years after John Toole had taken his own life

The book is "A Confederacy of Dunces" and is, in my experience, a love-it-or-hate-it-work. I personally love it. It's the story of one of the most despicable protagonists in English literature trying to find a way to earn money in the early 1960's. It switches randomly between a number of wildly different threads, giving no real clue why. As the story progresses they become gradually tied together, finally ending in one hysterical scene which predated similar endings in Seinfeld by almost 30 years.

Some of you won't like the book. It's not for everyone. But for those who enjoy it, it's a masterpiece.

John Toole only had one other book published (after the success of Confederacy of Dunces) called The Neon Bible. It was written when he was a teenager, and is the only other work we have from this brilliant, but obviously sadly sick, individual. And we will never know what else he might have written if his life hadn't ended so early.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Mrs. Myelin: "This is Sarah Myelin! My MS made my left arm go numb yesterday! I need to see Dr. Grumpy, and get an MRI done, today!"

Mary: "Well, it's Friday afternoon, and we don't have anything till next week, let me... Wait, you sent us a letter last month saying you were transferring care to Dr. Oligodendro down at Humungous Neurology, Inc."

Sunday, January 27, 2013

This past weekend, for those of you who were fortunate enough to miss
it, was (at least in my area) the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby.

This annual event was actually once rated as one of the 100 greatest things about America (Reader's Digest magazine, 2006). I can only assume that the author had never been involved in one, or that in 2006 the country had absolutely gone to hell.

The
point of this "friendly competition" is to build little cars and race
them down a slanted track. Each 8-11 year old is given a standardized
block of wood and 4 wheels, and can do what they want with them.
Since the stakes are so high (winner gets a plastic trophy from Big
Lots), the cars are carefully examined, weighed, and locked away 3
days before the race. This is to make sure that illegal modifications,
like adding a jet engine, aren't carried out.

The
whole part about this being a competition among the boys is absolute
BS. It's between their testosterone charged fathers, living
vicariously through the kids. Dads build the cars, and (occasionally)
let junior make a few finishing touches (like putting a Pokemon decal
on).

Of course, no one actually admits to this. So at
each derby one of the finest moments is when the person in charge
brings in the cars from the nuclear-bomb proof hiding location, and
boys go ask dad which car is theirs. "Oh! That's mine? Cool job, Dad!"

(In our family, it's actually Mrs. Grumpy who does all this. I'm just a shill).

You can always tell the ones that the boys actually made themselves
because they have uneven paint jobs, strange angles, and an odd
number of wheels. Of course, they never win a race, because they're no
match for the ones that some dad, who by day designs jet fighters for
Lockheed, built (and claimed his kid did, using a wind tunnel testing
facility that's coincidentally in the basement).

They ask you to arrive at 6:00 p.m. SHARP, which is a joke. The races never start on time.

So we arrived at the Wingnut Elementary School cafeteria at exactly 6:00, to find they'd just started
setting up. To lend atmosphere (and help us forget that we were in a
school cafeteria) some guys were hanging racing posters and pennants
everywhere. A bunch of moms were off in one corner setting up a bake
sale. And, most importantly, several dads were putting up the racing
track, grading it with a computerized angle & level measuring
device, as if it were made of gold.

While this is going
on, to get you in a cheerful mood, they show fun racing moments on a
large screen: cars and drivers in gory high-speed wrecks, flaming
rocket boats hurtling out-of-control into screaming crowds, Indy cars
exploding as they fuel up, and other humorous stuff.

Finally
the races begin. This is kicked off by them blasting early 90's dance
music. So if you've had a burning desire to hear C & C Music
Factory, M.C. Hammer, and (not early 90's) ENDLESS replays of "The History of Rock & Roll, part 2"*, this is the place to be.

Each
race features 4 cars, and they run them 3-4 times each, changing
lanes each time. The race itself takes 5-10 seconds. Then they
hand-carry the cars back to the starting point. Each is then
reinspected (to make sure their owner didn't, say, use a blowgun to
secretly attach a V8 engine while they were going down the track),
carefully returned to the starting gate, and we begin again. And in
the background 2 guys are still busy putting up racing poster
decorations.

The race results are presented on a
constantly-changing computerized time sheet, projected on the wall.
This, I swear, measures finishing times TO SIX DECIMAL PLACES (i.e.
5.756381 seconds). Because, you know, that kind of space-travel level of
precision is absolutely necessary when small wooden blocks are rolling
down a track. And the dads obsessively stare at this like it's a topless
dancer, while the kids play their Nintendo DS.

At some
point your kids come to you asking for money. Why? Because they're
selling pizza and various other junk food. They even asked you to
bring something, because it's "for a good cause" (they never tell you
what the good cause is. For all I know it's Botox for the counter
lady). So you stop at Costco, pick up a HUGE box of Oreos, and give
them to her. The Oreos are then marked up to 50 cents each, and the
box is now worth more than an equivalent amount of plutonium. We
discovered it was best to feed the kids before leaving our house, and
making sure we have nothing but credit cards when we get there. "They
only take cash? Sorry, kids."

This insanity goes on for 3-4 freakin' hours.
Most people start to leave as soon as their kid is disqualified from
the finals, but some parents (due to, say, their wives secretly
signing them up to be involved in taking apart the damn track and not
telling you about it until you ask if you can leave yet, for example)
are stuck there until the bitter end. So you tap your feet and watch 2
guys continue to heroically put up racing posters.

Toward
the end you start looking for something to do. Like helping the
school janitor put away the folding chairs (he wants to go home, too).
So if anyone stands up, you grab their chair and toss it in the
closet, hoping they weren't planning on sitting down again. I figured
if anyone fell and hurt themselves, I could hand out business cards.

Finally,
it's over. If your kid didn't win, you don't care who did. As you're
leaving, you notice the 2 guys are finally finishing putting up the
last racing poster.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

My reader Alysia was so profoundly moved by the post on the Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News that she sent me a journal that comes to her office:

Hey! Is "commercialization" really a word? And does
the illustration have boobs?

I was so struck by a magazine titled simply "BONEZONE" that I asked some friends what the word made them think of. To no one's surprise, a medical journal wasn't one of them. But I did get some good answers, including:

"A hook-up bar."

"Dr. Grumpy's college bachelor pad."

"The new programming package on ESPN3, offering round-the-clock live coverage of professional athletes' orthopedic surgeries."

Monday, January 21, 2013

Thank you for offering me a free subscription to the prestigious "Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News."

Really. I am not making this up.

You have no idea how excited I am to get a complimentary year of your journal. Breaking news on drug packaging trends is crucial to a modern physician. I often lie in bed thinking about topics such as "Paper or Plastic: The Future of Drugstore Bagging" or "Which Side are You On? Bubble Wrap vs. Peanuts." Regrettably, I've always been deeply unfulfilled by the lack of such coverage in run-of-the-mill neurology publications.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Every afternoon, about 5 minutes before I get to their school, I send a group text to all 3 kids saying "come outside" to let them know I'm almost there. It goes to all 3, because on any given day I have no idea whose phone is dead/turned off/left at home.

So I got there yesterday. Frank and Marie are standing outside. Marie says "Craig is inside" and they start loading their backpacks into the trunk. Frank and Marie get in the car, and we sit there in the blowing snow, waiting for Craig.

After a few minutes of waiting Marie says "Dad, do you want me to go tell Craig that you're here?"

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Dr. Grumpy: "Hi, I'm trying to get a neck MRI authorized on a lady with a Horner's Syndrome."

Dr. Heller: "Why do you need a neck MRI?"

Dr. Grumpy: "Because the nerves in question go from the brain down the spinal cord, then into the top of the chest, then back up through the neck to the eye. So they can be damaged by problems in the neck, and I need to get a look at the area."

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Mrs. Etoh: "Yeah, I need to see Dr. Grumpy about my migraines, and a car accident."

Mary: "Okay... Generally he doesn't see legal cases. Are the 2 related?"

Mrs. Etoh: "Yeah, a migraine caused me to have a car accident, and I need someone willing to testify to that in court."

Mary: "I'm sorry, that isn't the sort of thing Dr. Grumpy does."

Mrs. Etoh: "Well, the police claim it was because my blood alcohol was 5 times the legal limit, so I need to find a neurologist to say it was falsely that high because of a migraine, and that I hadn't been drinking at all. Will he do that?"

Welcome to my whining!

This blog is entirely for entertainment purposes. All posts about patients may be fictional, or be my experience, or were submitted by a reader, or any combination of the above. Factual statements may or may not be accurate.

Singing Foo!

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Note: I do not answer medical questions. If you are having a medical issue, see your own doctor. For all you know I'm really a Mongolian yak herder and have no medical training at all except in issues regarding the care and feeding of Mongolian yaks.